The only real reason that online businesses pour so many resources into article marketing is to get more traffic. That’s why the better Internet writing services flourish, and it’s why the top article directories never lack fresh content.
Our syndicated article help us in this way in two potential ways. On the one hand, we can receive visitors directly from those articles when the readers click a link in our resource (or author’s) box, and/or, alternatively, the major search engines can notice our article link and give greater important to that landing page on our site. This latter option leads to more traffic, eventually, by sending us visitors who have found our page in the search engine results.
Trying to maximize our results from those two methods causes a problem. The pages that we want to optimize in the search engines may not be the same pages to which we would ideally send our article readers. Let me explain this problem in a little more detail.
Often we pay the most SEO attention to pages that generate revenue directly. We are optimizing, in those cases, for searchers who are in a buying state of mind–or at worst in the state of mind in which they just need a little shove to make that final decision.
On the other hand, the readers of our syndicated articles are, typically, at a much earlier stage in the decision making process. They are usually at a stage of beginning information gathering. That’s why they came to our article rather than going directly to a store or service provider.
Now, hang onto those two competing states of mind for a moment, while we consider how we construct pages on a business website. A basic marketing principle of good website design for a business is that each page within our site should be constructed in a way that contributes to creating only one action on the part of the prospect. That action might be buying or signing up for our mailing list in order to receive additional information. So, if we absolutely obey the marketing rule, it is logically impossible to both optimize the most prized pages on the site and simultaneously satisfy the human reader–can we?
That is the seemingly unwinnable choice that faces us. Should we focus our article marketing efforts on SEO or on providing a landing page for our readers that will offer them what they truly desire at their current stage of decision making (or procrastination, in some cases)? Should we abide by the simple, common sense marketing rule, or should we magically try to successfully incorporate two disparate objectives within this single site of the page?
We must consider these options carefully in both our article syndication decisions and our copywriting decisions within the website itself.
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